The advantages of active matrix organic light emitting device (“AMOLED”) displays include lower power consumption, manufacturing flexibility and faster refresh rate over conventional liquid crystal displays. In contrast to conventional liquid crystal displays, there is no backlighting in an AMOLED display, and thus each pixel consists of different colored OLEDs emitting light independently. The OLEDs emit light based on current supplied through drive transistors controlled by programming voltages. The power consumed in each pixel has a relation with the magnitude of the generated light in that pixel.
The quality of output in an OLED-based pixel is affected by the properties of the drive transistor, which is typically fabricated from materials including but not limited to amorphous silicon, polysilicon, or metal oxide, as well as the OLED itself. In particular, threshold voltage and mobility of the drive transistor tend to change as the pixel ages. In order to maintain image quality, changes in these parameters must be compensated for by adjusting the programming voltage. In order to do so, such parameters must be extracted from the driver circuit. The addition of components to extract such parameters in a simple driver circuit requires more space on a display substrate for the drive circuitry and thereby reduces the amount of aperture or area of light emission from the OLED.
When biased in saturation, the I-V characteristic of a thin film drive transistor depends on mobility and threshold voltage which are a function of the materials used to fabricate the transistor. Thus different thin film transistor devices implemented across the display panel may demonstrate non-uniform behavior due to aging and process variations in mobility and threshold voltage. Accordingly, for a constant voltage, each device may have a different drain current. An extreme example may be where one device could have low threshold-voltage and low mobility compared to a second device with high threshold-voltage and high mobility.
Thus with very few electronic components available to maintain a desired aperture, extraction of non-uniformity parameters (i.e. threshold voltage, Vth, and mobility, μ) of the drive TFT and the OLED becomes challenging. It would be desirable to extract such parameters in a driver circuit for an OLED pixel with as few components as possible to maximize pixel aperture. It would also be desirable to combine parameter extraction with in-pixel compensation for optimum lifetime performance.